Published reports & articles from 2000 to 2018gvnet.com/humantrafficking/Laos.htm

Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Laos)

Despite
this high growth rate, Laos remains a country with an underdeveloped
infrastructure, particularly in rural areas. It has no railroads, a
rudimentary road system, and limited external and internal telecommunications,
though the government is sponsoring major improvements in the road system
with support from Japan and China. Electricity is available in urban areas
and in many rural districts. Subsistence agriculture, dominated by rice,
accounts for about 40% of GDP and provides 80% of total employment.[The World Factbook,
U.S.C.I.A. 2009]

Laos is primarily a source country for
women and girls trafficked primarily to Thailand for the purposes of
commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor as domestic or factory
workers. Some Lao men, women, and children migrate to neighboring countries
in search of better economic opportunities but are subjected to conditions of
forced or bonded labor or forced prostitution after their arrival.- U.S. State Dept Trafficking in
Persons Report, June, 2009[full country report]

CAUTION:The following
links have been culled from the web to illuminate the situation in Laos.Some of these links may lead to websites
that present allegations that are unsubstantiated or even false.No attempt has been made to verify their
authenticity or to validate their content.

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Freedom House Country Report - Political Rights: 7Civil Liberties: 6Status: Not Free

G4. DO INDIVIDUALS
ENJOY EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY AND FREEDOM FROM ECONOMIC EXPLOITATION?

Trafficking in
persons, especially to Thailand, is common, and enforcement of antitrafficking measures is hindered by a lack of
transparency and weak rule of law. The building of new roads through Laos in
recent years has aided trafficking operations.

Khan was 11 years
old when she was kidnapped from her home in the hill country of Laos. She was
taken to an embroidery factory in Thailand, and with dozens of other children
was made to work 14 hours a day for food and clothing. They received no
wages.

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Laos reports 970 victims of human
trafficking

Xinhua News Agency, September 20, 2007

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

"Trafficking
... contributes to the spread of HIV by significantly increasing the
vulnerability of trafficked persons to infection," said Caitlin Wiesen-Antin, HIV/AIDS regional coordinator, Asia and
Pacific, for the United Nations Development Programme
(UNDP)."Both human trafficking
and HIV greatly threaten human development and security."

Major human
trafficking routes run between Nepal and India and between Thailand and
neighbors like Laos, Cambodia and
Myanmar. Many of the victims are young teenage girls who end up in
prostitution."The link between
human trafficking and HIV/AIDS has only been identified fairly
recently," Wiesen-Antin told the International
Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific.

The ins and outs of leaving Laos

Clifford McCoy, Asia Times Online,
Vientiane, Aug 11, 2007

www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/IH11Ae01.html

[accessed 17 February 2011]

Local trafficking
networks inside Laos are still mostly unorganized and informally run. Much of
the trade consists of informal networks, often family members, friends or
fellow villagers who have gone abroad to work before and have maintained
connections. On this level, the arrangement of employment is done
individually, often as a personal business. Once across the border in
Thailand, however, the human-trafficking connections are very structured and
well organized.

The family members
or friends who say they can arrange employment are often tied into these
networks, even if they are not formal members themselves. Once they have
persuaded a Lao to seek work abroad, that person, often a young woman or
under-age girl, is literally sold to the network, with the broker receiving a
finder's fee.

Lao men are
sometimes forced to serve on fishing trawlers, where they work long hours in
deplorable conditions, sometimes not being allowed to return to shore for
months. Lao women frequently find themselves sold to brothel or
massage-parlor owners, who often force them to service numerous customers
each day to pay off their broker fee, which in some instances takes years to
repay fully.

Since the signing
of the historic COMMIT Memorandum of Understanding in Yangon, Myanmar in October
2004, by Ministers of the six countries, the Governments have been active in
laying the foundation for a network of cooperation to stop traffickers and
prosecute them, protect victims of trafficking and assist them return safely
home, and launch efforts to prevent others from sharing the same fate.

Thai police on
Wednesday raided two karaoke bars in a province near Bangkok and rescued 47
women from neighboring Laos who
were forced to work as prostitutes, police said.

The women rescued
from the bars in Chachoengsao province, 30
kilometers (19 miles) east of the capital, included eight girls under age 18,
said police Col. KraibunSongsuat.
He said the bars' operators had kept the doors to the bars locked to keep the
women from escaping.

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 7 September 2011]

In one example of
forced labor, a 14-year-old boy from Laos was sold to an embroidery factory
in Thailand, where he was forced to work long hours for no wages. "If
any of the children acted up, the factory owner would lock them in a small
room and dump industrial chemicals on them," Miller said.

Christians Persecuted in Laos

U.S. Newswire, Vientiane, April 26, 2004

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 7 September 2011]

CHRISTIANS SENTENCED
TO FORCED LABOR
- Christians in Laos are routinely arrested and placed in forced labor camps
to work in rice fields. Sometimes all Christians in a village are arrested at
the same time and are forced to work in the rice fields for four to five
months without pay.

Statistical
estimates indicate 300,000 women have been sold into the sex trade in Western
Europe in the last 10 years, and since 1990, 80,000 women and children from
Myanmar (formerly Burma), Cambodia, Laos
and China have been sold into Thailand's sex industry.

Trafficking of
children from Laos to Thailand for commercial labor and sexual exploitation is
increasing despite measures being taken to reverse the trend, according to a
Lao government report presented Wednesday at a U.N.-sponsored conference on
child rights in Southeast Asia.

In Laos, very often
the boys are approached directly, lured with baits of free drugs, good times,
alcohol, ‘chicks’. But for girls there is a different modus operandi – the
parents are approached. They are told, "Somebody is looking for a
maid," or "A big mall is opening up in Bangkok and it needs 500
salesladies." One of the usual ways of approaching Asian children is
through labour, through promised jobs.

In Asia,
trafficking in children both between and within various countries is on the
increase. In recent years, large numbers of children from Cambodia, China,
Laos and Myanmar have been forced to work as prostitutes in Thailand. Both
girls and boys from poor rural areas are lured by professional recruiters and
traffickers with promises of legitimate jobs in Thailand's booming economy.

He said the
majority of the young trafficking victims who saw the video said they had not
been aware of the risks and possible consequences associated with work
migration.KhammouneSouphanthong, director of the Lao Social Welfare
Department, welcomed the video, saying it would be a useful tool in educating
Lao children on the dangers of trafficking. Local and Thai procurers lure Lao
boys and girls with false promises of well-paid jobs in Thailand, he said.
Many young Laotians were easy prey because they were attracted by the chance
of becoming "modernised" in the style of
role models seen on Thai television, he said.

Human Rights
Reports » 2005 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices

U.S. Dept of State
Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, March 8, 2006

TRAFFICKING
IN PERSONS
– The majority of trafficking victims have been lowland Lao, although small
numbers of highland minority women have also been victimized by traffickers.
Minority groups were particularly vulnerable because they do not have the
cultural familiarity or linguistic proximity to Thai that
Lao‑speaking workers can use to protect themselves from
exploitative situations. A much smaller number of trafficked foreign
nationals, especially Burmese and Vietnamese, transited through the country.

Many labor
recruiters in the country were local persons with cross‑border
experience and were known to the trafficking victims. For the most part, they
had no connection to organized crime, commercial sexual exploitation, or the
practice of involuntary servitude, but their services usually ended once their
charges reached Thailand, where more organized trafficking operations
operated.

Concluding Observations of the Committee on
the Rights of the Child (CRC)

[10] The Committee
is concerned at the insufficient attention paid by the State party to
systematic, comprehensive and disaggregated qualitative and quantitative data
collection and to the identification of appropriate indicators and mechanisms
to evaluate the progress and the impact of policies and measures adopted for
all areas covered by the Convention, especially the most hidden such as child
abuse or ill-treatment, but also in relation to all groups of children
including minority group children, girl children, children in rural areas,
and children victims of sale, trafficking and prostitution.

[27] The Committee
is concerned by the increasing phenomenon of child prostitution and
trafficking, which affects boys as well as girls. It is worried about the
insufficiency of measures to prevent and combat this phenomenon, and the lack
of rehabilitation measures.